OREANDA-NEWS. The African Development Bank has a busy schedule ahead as mining companies, investors, ministers, regulators policy-makers, civil society and the world's media gather at the annual Investing in African Mining Indaba Conference in Cape Town.

In addition to AfDB executives holding numerous meetings with key figures in the extractives industry throughout the conference, which runs February 9-12, the Bank is hosting three events. Representatives from the Bank's African Legal Support Facility (ALSF), African Natural Resources Center, Economics and Development Research Department, Sector Operations, and Southern Africa Resource Center (SARC) are slated to participate in the Cape Town meeting. 

The first event organized by the AfDB is a special information session and panel discussion co-hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) entitled “Leveraging Mineral Resources for Human Development.”

The event will present early findings from the report Maximizing the Impact of Extractives for Human Development in Africa, a joint Gates Foundation-AfDB publication to be published in May 2015. The discussion will cover policy options for eight African countries with newly-discovered extractive resources and how best to channel some of this fresh resource wealth towards boosting human development.

The co-moderators will be the Bank’s Acting Vice-President and Chief Economist, Steve Kayizzi-Mugerwa, together with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Africa Director, Ayo Ayayi. The second event will be a Ministerial Forum. It will be introduced by a representative of the AfDB's African Legal Support Facility (ALSF), which helps support African states to negotiate better agreements with project builders and operators. This will be followed by presentations from the ministers responsible for mines from Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Niger and Zambia.

The Bank will host another two-hour special information session, entitled “Shared Resources, Shared Values and Benefits.” The discussion will centre on how the wealth generated by Africa's natural resources can produce more benefits for the people of Africa and accelerate human development on the continent. The panelists will include Steve Karangizi, Director of the ALSF, and representatives from the World Bank,  International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), the UK's Department for International Development, and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in South Africa.

The AfDB will share its expertise on how the industry can improve mineral project development outcomes for mutual gain between governments and investors. It will also be raising awareness of the Bank's activities in the mining and mining services sector.

Examples of mining projects that the AfDB supports on the continent include the OCP (Office Ch?rifien des Phosphates) corporate loan in Morocco, the Ambatovy Nickel Project in Madagascar and the Moma Mineral Sands Project in Mozambique.

The AfDB is also mobilizing financial and technical resources to support the US \$20-billion Simandou iron ore project in Guinea.